EarthCODE - a FAIR and Open Environment for collaborative research in Earth System Science

The Open Science and Innovation Vision included in ESA’s EO Science Strategy (2024) addresses 8 key elements: 1) openness of research data, 2) open-source scientific code, 3) open access papers with data and code; 4) standards-based publication and discovery of scientific experiments, 5) scientific workflows reproducible on various infrastructures, 6) access to education on open science, 7) community practice of open science; and 8) EO business models built on open-source. EarthCODE (https://earthcode.esa.int) is a strategic ESA EO initiative to support the implementation of this vision. 

EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) will form part of the next generation of cloud-based geospatial services, aiming towards an integrated, cloud-based, user-centric development environment for European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth science activities. EarthCODE looks to maximise long-term visibility, reuse and reproducibility of the research outputs of such projects, by leveraging FAIR and open science principles and enabling, thus fostering a sustainable scientific process. EarthCODE proposes a flexible and scalable architecture developed with interoperable open-source blocks, with a long-term vision evolving by incrementally integrating industrially provided services from a portfolio of the Network of Resources.  Additionally, EarthCODE is a utilisation domain of EOEPCA+, contributing to the development and evolution of Open Standards and protocols, enabling internationally interoperable solutions.  

EarthCODE will provide an Integrated Development Platform, giving developers tools needed to develop high quality workflows, allowing experiments to be executed in the cloud and be end-to-end reproduced by other scientists. EarthCODE is built around existing open-source solutions, building blocks and platforms, such as the Open Science Catalogue, EOxHub and EOEPCA. It has additionally begun to integrate platform services from DeepESDL, Euro Data Cube, Polar TEP and the openEO federation on CDSE platforms, with more being added annually through ESA best practices. With it’s adopted federated approach, EarthCODE will facilitate processing on other platforms, i.e. DeepESDL, ESA EURO Data Cube, Open EO Cloud/Open EO Platform and AIOPEN/AI4DTE.   

The roadmap for the portal includes the initial portal release by end of 2024, followed by the capability to publish experiments in Q1 2025 (including development, publishing, finding and related community engagement), and by mid-2025 to have a further release with reproducibility capabilities around accessibility and execute functionalities.  

Collaboration and Federation are at the heart of EarthCODE. As EarthCODE evolves we expect providing solutions allowing federation of data and processing. EarthCODE has ambition to deliver a model for a Collaborative Open Development Environment for Earth system science, where researchers can leverage the power of the wide range of EO platform services available to conduct their science, while also making use of FAIR Open Science tools to manage data, code and documentation, create end-to-end reproducible workflows on platforms, and have the opportunity to discover, use, reuse, modify and build upon the research of others in a fair and safe way. Overall, EarthCODE aims to enable elements for EO Open Science and Innovation vision, including open data, open-source code, linked data/code, open-access documentation, end-to-end reproducible workflows, open-science resources, open-science tools, and a healthy community applying all the elements in their practice.